Emily Mortimer: ‘You can’t say no to Paddington – he’s a leader of men’

Ahead of her starring role in the third Paddington film, the actress talks about about uprooting to America and shedding self-doubt

A whitewashed loft studio in Hudson Yards, beneath silvery-blue skyscrapers on the western edge of Manhattan, is a curiously American place to meet Emily Mortimer. Few stars seem more quintessentially British.
This is a woman who went to St Paul’s Girls’ School and read English and Russian at Lincoln College, Oxford, who wrote a column for The Telegraph, before taking roles in Sharpe’s Sword and Midsomer Murders and as the ‘perfect girl’ Hugh Grant inexplicably chucks in the film Notting Hill.
Even as Mortimer has gone on to work with a pantheon of auteurs and superstars – Martin Scorsese, Roger Michell and Aaron Sorkin, Scarlett Johansson, Woody Harrelson, a brace of Ryans (Reynolds and Gosling) – she has retained the image of someone you would as soon bump into in a Fulham Waitrose as on Sunset Boulevard. Her father, John Mortimer QC, created Rumpole of the Bailey. She’s one of our own, as English as apple crumble.
Except she isn’t. Or only sort of. Mortimer has lived in New York for 20 years now, since she married her American husband, Alessandro ‘Sandro’ Nivola, who is also an actor. She has been a US citizen for 14 years. Their two children, Sam and May, are 21 and 14.
“I am back and forth all the time,” she protests, having changed out of the vamped-up shoot outfits and back into jeans, a navy cardie and blue loafers. “My husband jokes that I would go back to pick up a postage stamp. But when we were deciding where to live, being an American actor in England felt harder than being an English actor in America. I’ve kept saying maybe one day I’ll get them back. But today my kids are so American. I remember the first day Sam came home from nursery school saying ‘pants’ rather than trousers.
“I think it becomes that wherever the children are happiest, I’m happiest. New York does feel like home, but still if someone says “the Meatpacking district” I panic because I have no idea what they are talking about.”
Mortimer is bright, charming and self-effacing, almost to a fault, with the apologetic mystification of someone who seems to think they have become a film star by mistake. She did, in a way: hers has been a slow-build rather than overnight explosion. As a writer, director and performer, at 53 she says she finally feels in control. No longer being the bright young thing, exactly, comes with a certain freedom. Photoshoots are a case in point.
“There’s something about getting older where you just think there’s nothing much I can do about this,” she says, gesturing down her torso. “So I just have to embrace whatever it is that I look like. There’s some kind of abandon, a tipping point, where you can’t expect to be psyched about the way that you look. Anything is a bonus.
“You go into any situation thinking, ‘I’m going to feel really miserable when I look at these photographs,’ because there’s no way you’re not. Past a certain point, you’re just like, ‘I’m never going to like the way I look, so I’ll just enjoy it.’ All bets are off!”
Her latest role has the potential to be the biggest box-office success of her career. Forget Leonardo DiCaprio and Gary Oldman. In her new film, Mortimer finds herself opposite perhaps the biggest star in world cinema: Paddington Bear.
Paddington in Peru is the third of the live-action Paddington films, the first two of which escaped their cutesy English origins to become global smash hits, grossing more than $500 million between them. They are modern classics of the ‘children’s films that adults can enjoy’ genre.
Ben Whishaw voices the big-hearted little bear from Peru; Hugh Bonneville plays Mr Brown, his adoptive father. Mortimer has stepped in to play his wife, Mrs Brown, after Sally Hawkins, who played the part in the first two films, announced she would be leaving. When Bonneville found out Hawkins was off, Mortimer’s was the first name he suggested.
“It was so flattering,” Mortimer says. “It was a nerve-racking proposition in lots of ways, because it was stepping into this world and character and everything. It felt like a big responsibility. But on the other hand, to say no – not just to Hugh, but to Paddington – would be so churlish. It’s thrilling. An honour!” In a statement announcing she wouldn’t be returning, Hawkins gave her blessing to her ‘truly wonderful’ replacement.
“You can’t say no to Paddington,” Mortimer adds, as if she was talking about an OBE or a lunch invitation from Tony Soprano. “If he turned malevolent, he could really do some damage. He’s a leader of men. You can’t turn him down.”
Rosie Alison, the film’s executive producer, says she was thrilled by Mortimer’s performance. “Emily has such beautiful qualities,” she says. “She has a Paddington spirit, a very can-do attitude. She is the beating emotional heart of the Brown family and the relationship with Paddington. She has a lovely adventurous spirit; and she’s a great writer too.”
The only complication, fittingly given the family-friendly subject matter, was Mortimer trying to fit her own family plans around the schedule. “We worked hard to carve out bits so she could still be a mother to her children,” says Alison. “That was the only hesitation.”
Part of the films’ charm is the way they blend live-action people and footage with the CGI bear, which echoes the fantastical premise of the books, in which a bear from Peru walks, talks and wears a red hat among real-life people. On screen, the technique requires extraordinary levels of world-building.
Paddington is acted by four different people; a Parisian mime to get the limb movements; Lauren Barrand, who is the same height as the bear and does most of the acting with the other cast; a third actor to give most of Paddington’s facial expressions; and finally Ben Whishaw, who provides the voice and the most intimate expressions. Then the CGI begins.
It means that Mortimer did not actually work in person with Whishaw during filming, but he has nothing but praise for her performance.
“I adore Emily,” Whishaw says. “I think it’s hard to replace Sally Hawkins, who is extraordinary, and that Emily had the courage to do that and then to make the role so much her own is testament to who she is as a person and an actor. She’s such an amazing comedian and can find warmth and wit in the tiniest moment or phrase or look. I suppose all you can do as actors is try to bring yourself to it sincerely and truthfully and Emily just does that.”
The third film takes Paddington back to Peru. The Browns receive a letter from the nun who runs the bear retirement home, played by Olivia Colman in full Maria von Trapp mode, warning that Paddington’s Aunt Lucy is missing him terribly. Mrs Brown, worried about an empty nest, seizes the moment to bring the family together for a holiday.
It is a feeling to which Mortimer can relate. Whatever her reservations about her trade, she has not managed to prevent her children from joining and forming what she calls a ‘circus family’. Sam and May both appeared in Noah Baumbach’s recent adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise. (Mortimer has written a script for Baumbach’s new film, but can’t say much about it beyond confirming its existence.) Soon Sam will appear in the third series of HBO’s The White Lotus, being shot in Thailand.
“I’ve already got [the empty nest feeling], big time,” she says. “Sam went off to college and then he went off around the world acting. I was accessing that feeling a lot during filming. It was something else I felt I could contribute to the story. It’s a feeling I know, and it’s really painful.”
Of her ursine co-star, she says his sense of displacement is universal: “I think everybody relates to Paddington somehow, to that feeling of belonging everywhere and nowhere, or to having a home and feeling both at home and not at home.
“But there’s something about the chaos of him, too, the scrapes he is always getting into. There’s something about these heroes who are also a mess that is very beguiling. I don’t know. It’s some alchemy you can’t put your finger on.”
If anyone would have learned about the alchemy of literature as a girl, it is Mortimer. Her father, John, was a criminal defence barrister as well as the beloved author of A Voyage Round My Father and the Rumpole of the Bailey series. It was he who said that “to escape jury duty in England, wear a bowler hat and carry a copy of the Daily Telegraph”, which regrettably no longer works.
John had two children, then went on to have Emily in 1971 with his second wife, Penny Gollop. They had another daughter, Rosie, 13 years later. Her father died in 2009; her mother is still alive and had a tiny part in the 2021 adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, which Mortimer directed. Although her father John taught her Holmes, Dickens and Shakespeare – her own literary education came later.
“I didn’t learn to read until embarrassingly late,” she says. “I was read to a lot by my dad, and Paddington was something he read to me. Partly it was the marmalade. Dad really liked marmalade and I’m a mad marmalade fan myself. Why would a bear have marmalade sandwiches, anyway? Why would he keep them under his hat? It’s so whimsical and funny and stupid. I think what’s cool is it defies categorisations, it’s just a feeling you get that’s so winning and charming. Every time you try to be earnest about it you sound pretentious.”
Apart from a love of literature, her father grounded her in jurisprudence. “He’d always have funny stories about the terrible people he was defending,” she says. “‘Like a lot of lawyers or doctors or people dealing on the frontline, where life gets messy, he had a gallows humour. He gloried in the absurdity of it.
“He defended a lot of murderers, pornography, did a lot of free-speech cases. It was an amazing education for me and my sister, especially as a writer and an actor. The point is not to decide about people, but to keep your mind open.
“He kept saying murder is very human. It’s the one thing most of us could do. Most of us wouldn’t run a drug ring or fiddle our taxes but there might be a moment where things get really extreme with somebody – often someone that you love.”
One wonders what he would have made of the modern online world, where opinions are thicker on the ground than fact. “There’s so much judging,” she says. “And a lot of pontificating and moralising. There is a lot of stuff around being the daughter of a criminal defence lawyer that I find myself going back to, like being innocent until proven guilty and everyone deserving a fair hearing.”
She was not one of those larger-than-life theatre children. “I was cripplingly shy. I would go bright red if anyone said my name in class. I would dread my friends coming to my mum and dad’s house. I would think they were going to think I was such a loser. I remember once my mum was like, “You’re so weird, you’ve got to have a friend round.”
“I plucked up the courage and invited this girl for the weekend. I planned a list of activities with military precision so she wouldn’t have a second to think it was weird or boring or depressing. The first thing on the list was going to feed the horses. We took these carrots to feed the horses and within five seconds the tip of her finger was bitten off. As we sat there in A&E, all I can remember thinking was that I was so relieved we wouldn’t have to go through with the rest of the weekend.”
Acting became a way to do things with other people; so too was serving plates of pasta, during a brief stint at The River Cafe. “Waitressing was a bit like doing a school play,” she says. “It’s a way of being with people but having something to do that takes the pressure off.”
She started to come out of her shell at Oxford. An agent watched her in a student adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial – directed by Tom Hooper, who would go on to win an Oscar for The King’s Speech – and took her on straightaway. Even so, and despite her famous father, her progress towards stardom came by inches rather than all at once, with small roles on stage and screen. She even toyed with journalism.
“I’d seen my dad getting a pound a word writing ridiculous stuff about nothing for the Daily Mail,’ she says. ‘He was dashing them off, so I thought that’s what I will do too.”
As a teenager she wrote bits and pieces for the Evening Standard. “I remember a really snide, bitchy little piece about Phillip Schofield, where I got everything wrong. I’ve often felt bad that I did that.”
After Oxford, Sarah Sands, editing at The Telegraph, asked her to write a diary column. “I think she wanted a real diary of me, but I didn’t really have a social life. So I made it up. It was a kind of sub-Bridget Jones diary of an insecure, quite bad young actress called Nina. I was always crying, because I think I wrote it every two weeks and I was always leaving it to the last minute. I was in my 20s, way too drunk and out of it, I was not a responsible human. The deadline thing would hang over me every time.”
Her reputation accumulated rather than exploded. She met Nivola on the set of Kenneth Branagh’s version of Love’s Labour’s Lost in 2000. She was in Disney’s The Kid opposite Bruce Willis, the cult hit Lovely & Amazing, The 51st State with Samuel L Jackson, Bright Young Things with Peter O’Toole and everyone else. She provided the English voice for the heroine, Sophie, in Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle.
She was in Woody Allen’s Match Point, Scorsese’s Shutter Island, with Michael Caine in Harry Brown. A memorable minor role as Alec Baldwin’s fragile girlfriend Phoebe in 30 Rock, in reference to which she says, “People still shout “hollow bones” across the street at me.”
In 2012 she finally got a juicy lead as Mac McHale in The Newsroom, an ambitious state-of-the-nation drama from Aaron Sorkin, who created The West Wing. It seemed like the kind of thing that might run for ever, but was cancelled after two series.
The vast production, working for the notoriously exacting Sorkin, was a drastic contrast to Doll & Em, a comedy Mortimer made with her childhood friend, Dolly Wells, around the same time: “I’m grateful to The Newsroom and I enjoyed it, but it was nerve-racking. Doing Doll & Em at the same time, it was a feeling that you could do something with someone you really love, who is your best friend.”
Despite Mortimer’s growing reputation as a writer and actor, it is telling that she was only given the chance to direct, in 2021’s The Pursuit of Love, because its star, Lily James, insisted on it. Even post-MeToo, the door still had to be kicked down by another woman.
“I knew I maybe wanted to direct sometime, but it was Lily who decided that’s what I should do,” she says. “They had to say yes, because she was financing the whole thing. She was in charge. This door opened that I knew I had to walk through. But I was terrified of having to be in charge, because that’s something I’m bad at in real life.
“My children laugh at me openly if I try to be authoritative. I can’t, and I’m so scared. I’m the good cop to such an extreme it’s really f—ked up. I have no natural authority. It pains me to say no to people. I will do anything to be liked, even at the cost of my marriage and my children’s respect for me.
“But I found you are imbued with authority that comes with your position. The neurosis goes away because you absolutely have to tell people what to do. I said to a therapist at the time that I might have solved my issue of people-pleasing. My shrink was like, “I think you’ll find when you get back to real life, it will be exactly as it was.” She was completely right.
“I love acting, but there’s a lot of s—t inside your head wondering whether you are pretty or funny or charming enough. Whereas when you are directing, it is only about telling the story.”
As an actor, her range keeps expanding. As well as Paddington she was recently in The New Look, a series for Apple TV+ about Christian Dior. Soon she will don a short grey wig to play the former Met police commissioner Cressida Dick.
In her writing, Mortimer is inching towards fulfilment: “I am coming closer and closer to finding my own voice, finally. But I don’t know if I’ve found it. I don’t want the article to say, ‘I’ve finally found my voice!’ Because I’m not sure I have. But I’m getting braver about trying.”
If after years of self-doubt she is finally giving herself a fair hearing, you suspect her father would be pleased.
Paddington in Peru is in cinemas from 8 November
Styling by Anna Katsanis